Made In Mexico

Could it be that Mexico is the only nation whose flag involves
lunch? Between its bands of green and red an eagle perched on a
prickly pear feasts on a snake, a reference to a legend that the
Aztecs founded Mexico City on the site where they found an eagle on
a cactus eating a serpent.

The city was built in 1325, the oldest capital in the Americas,
one of only two founded by native Americans. Now the time has come
to acknowledge it as one of the great eating cities of the world.
At the top tier, the names of its great restaurants might not be as
numerous as in Paris or Tokyo, but its brightest lights are as
inventive and inspired as any in the world, and they draw on a deep
well of inspiration. On the street, in the markets and in home
kitchens lives a cuisine that has ancient roots. It is complex in
its blending of regional, social and cultural influences, it takes
in the pre-Hispanic, the colonial and the modern, and accesses a
biodiversity unequalled anywhere else in the world. In their day
the Aztecs called Mexico City the belly button of the universe. The
feasting hasn't stopped since.

Right now the person with his finger on the belly button is
Enrique Olvera. He has been celebrated at home for many years now,
but has latterly won Mexican cuisine new respect in the wider
world. Cosme, the restaurant he opened in Manhattan in 2014,
changed the way Mexican food was perceived and understood in the
US. "Almost everything you taste at Cosme seems new without being
forced or mannered," wrote Pete Wells in a three-star review in
The New York Times. "It isn't the kind of Mexican cooking
that can be learned on a vacation."

Pujol's all-vegetable green mole.

Back at his headquarters at Pujol in Mexico City's glam Polanco
district, Olvera continues to explore his nation's food with a
singular blend of playfulness and respect. A meal at the restaurant
may begin with the offer of a Margarita made with tepache, a
ferment of pineapple skins, the drink served in a glass rimmed with
salt mixed with crushed dried maguey worms. He lines a snow pea
with tiny soft ant eggs sautéed with serrano chilli and flavoured
with epazote leaf. From course to course his food is crisply plated
but also finely tuned for the palate, ingredients delineated with
lines of citrus, heat and smoke.

Snow pea and escamoles (ant eggs) at Pujol.

His mole madre, a "mother mole", takes the rich and complex
reduction and uses it not to cook turkey or pork, but serves it as
sauce alone, a circle of black with a bullseye of red spooned
carefully into its centre.

It could be a perfect example of contemporary cooking tipping well
into emperor's new clothes territory - a gravy looking for a roast
- but in the context of a tasting menu at Pujol it's an expression
of purity, confidence and flavour. Olvera has taken the idea of the
sauce being better the day after you cook it to an extreme: based
on three chillies and chocolate, tomatoes, onions and garlic, it
has a dark, gently smoky, almost tobacco-like quality, drawn out
after simmering on the stove for 760 days and counting. The red
mole in the centre is fresh, its brightness coming from guajillo
chillies. It's served with nothing more than superb tortillas
flavoured with sesame. "Our food philosophy is that we like a lot
of flavour," says Olvera. "It's as simple as that."

The other chef really nailing the modern Mexican brief is Jorge
Vallejo. His restaurant, Quintonil, a scant few blocks from Pujol,
comprises a few small, informal rooms, but his cuisine overflows
with energy and good ideas.

Chef Jorge Vallejo of Quintonil.

Huitlacoche, a fungus that grows on corn in much the same way
that chewing gum grows underneath school desks, becomes beautiful
teamed with seaweed as the base for a clear, savoury broth poured
into a bowl with golden squash blossoms. There's the same sort of
clarity in an upside-down smoked crab tostada decked out in
coriander cress and habanero mayonnaise. The thinking is fresh, but
the flavours remain honest.

On the street, the smells of ripe fruit mingle with a hint of ash
in the air. Mexico City sits in an extinguished volcano, and heavy
clouds gather at the lip of the caldera, threatening rain. A
panoply of architectural influences meet in the upmarket
neighbourhoods. Aztec curves become Deco streamlining become the
cool planes of Modernism and back again, Kahlo blue to masa yellow,
all on one leafy block. And the street food scene is a thousand
times more diverse.

A street-food stall in Mexico City's Roma
neighbourhood.

You could spend a lifetime studying just the taco culture of
Mexico City, Arisbeth Araujo tells me. "The word for Mexico City is
diversity," she says. "It would be a mistake to only go to these
great restaurants without seeing where the flavours come from."
Araujo's a journalist, a periodista gastronómica, and also leads
food tours. I meet her one sunny Sunday morning outside the Mercado
San Juan; the plan is to walk around the neighbourhood's taco
stands, but first we wander the market, a favourite with exacting
cooks.

Inside, bushels of dried crickets and mealworms stand by great
baskets of morels and stalls piled high with bags of dried fish and
chillies. Piles of skinny, freshly flayed lambs and rabbits glisten
under the lights of the butcheries down the back. The famed Gran
Cazador, a supplier of the more exotic meats, lists iguana,
armadillo and, alarmingly, lion alongside its cuts of goat and
buffalo. Cheese stalls offer sour Mexican Manchego and Cotija, the
pungent crumbly cow's milk cheese that's scattered over grilled
corn or enchiladas. Doña Olivita, who runs the Los Primos spice
stand, invites us to taste her mole rojo. "You can tell this has
been cooked for a long time," says Araujo, "and she hasn't used too
much sugar to bring down the spiciness. She's very proud of
it."

Taqueria El Flaco.

Walking the surrounding streets of the Cuauhtémoc neighbourhood,
we hit Cocina Vianey, a barbacoa specialist since 1968, where a
cook chops slow-roasted mutton belly and offal with a very large
knife, ready to be served on hot tortillas with a full complement
of guacamole, fried pork scratchings, coriander, chopped raw white
onion and salsa borracha, otherwise known as drunk sauce.
Barbacoa's reputation as a hangover cure is shored up in large part
by the sopa made from the leftover bones that's served on the side,
its shimmering surface beaded with droplets of liquid fat,
chickpeas and rice lurking at the bottom of the bowl.

We find tlacoyos, flat ovals of blue-corn dough stuffed with beans
and requesón cheese, topped with cactus and Cotija. They're not
technically tacos, true, but they get past the line on flavour
points. Taquería el Flaco, meanwhile, specialises in tacos de
canasta. They're not made à la minute the usual way, but batched,
sometimes scalded with hot lard, and packed in baskets, or
canastas, where they steam. Accordingly they're also called steamed
tacos or, better still, tacos sudados - sweaty tacos. Last time I
was in Mexico City I ate tacos sudados stuffed with potato; at
Flaco they're filled with stewed, fried pork skin. No one is
claiming tacos are a health food.

Taco viajero at El Parnita

One of the most appealing things about Mexico City for the
food-focused traveller is that it's not one of those cities where
it's all top and bottom dining and no middle ground. The city and
its food culture are more than substantial enough to offer interest
at every level.

You want drinking food from the Yucatán peninsula served in a
convivial environment? Try Xel-Ha, a cantina in Condesa that more
than holds its own in the cochinita pibil stakes. Seafood in the
Baja California style dressed up for the money crowd? Don't miss
the sea urchin at MeroToro. A neighbourhood bistro that punches
above its weight with creative cooking? That'll be Maximo Bistrot.
A spin-off café for Mimosas and lattes and croque-monsieurs
complementing the chilaquiles (aka the thinking person's breakfast
nachos) and huevos rancheros? That's Maximo's sibling, Lalo!, one
long table in a long room strung with globes and splashed with neon
and bright playful aerosol art down one wall: smiling whales, fish,
birds and wrestlers.

Diners at Lalo!.

How about somewhere dedicated to the art of the long late Sunday
lunch, replete with good vibes and vast glass jars filled with
aguas frescas, the house-made soft drinks - guava and mandarin,
perhaps? You're going to love El Parnita. Somewhere that plays The
Strokes and Weezer while making some of the city's best third
wave-style coffee exclusively using beans grown in Mexico? Try Buna
42. A hip cocktail bar where the drinks are smoky and strong? Make
a beeline to Licorería Limantour in Roma.

But what about the gold-standard for guacamole, prepared tableside
in a friendly formal neighbourhood restaurant that seems to have
barely changed since the 1950s? For that there's only one choice:
Nicos, a much-loved landmark that's been doing its thing for nearly
60 years in the workingman's suburb of Azcapotzalco, about a
30-minute cab ride from the city centre. Prepared tableside from a
trolley laden with a basket of avocados and clay bowls of chopped
tomato, onion, coriander and chillies, the famed guac here is more
a business of crushing and folding with a fork and a spoon in the
stone molcajete than mashing or pounding. It's light and creamy,
but it has texture, and because the Nicos crew insist that fresh
guacamole needs no citrus, the flavour of the avocado comes through
clear and clean. They also bust out the trolleys for the Caesar,
the coffee and - yay - the tequila and mezcal. It's the sort of
place, too, where politicians and celebrity chefs rub shoulders
(and clink shots) with the neighbourhoods nurses and
students.

Talking with Jorge Vallejo later, we discuss the connection
between the Mexican food of the future, and the past, the food of
its streets and its most exclusive tables, and he hits on a notion
that will immediately ring true to anyone who has taken the time to
get to know the capital and its way of eating. "I don't think we
can make Mexican food too high-concept," he says. "It's so close to
the people and to the earth."